Major quake could be worse than Katrina

According to some experts, earthquake readiness has been hurt by the same shift of focus from natural disasters to terrorism that's being partly blamed for the bungled response to Katrina.

In 2003, when Congress moved FEMA to the Department of Homeland Security, lawmakers also moved the lead agency role for the earthquake program from FEMA to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But they never gave NIST any money to perform its new leadership role.

"Right now you have a program that probably has appropriated somewhere around $130 million per year, and we don't have a lead agency to supervise or manage it," said Tom O'Rourke, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.

Michael Buckley, deputy director of FEMA's mitigation division, denied there had been a decreased focus on disaster preparedness or mitigation, and said FEMA's work on earthquake preparedness has led to successes such as improved building code recommendations.

"From my perspective, we're holding our own pretty well, certainly are very busy, and I expect that that would be the trend here in the future," Buckley said.

California has instituted new building codes and spent billions to shore up old structures in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 and the Northridge earthquake of 1994, which, before Katrina, was the nation's costliest natural disaster with $40 billion in losses.

But many older buildings still need upgrades, including some 900 hospital buildings in California, and scientists would like to do more research to learn more about how to build structures that can withstand earthquakes.

A key network of seismographs USGS is installing around the country is lagging — only 563 of a planned 7,050 machines have been put in place, mainly because funding has stuck far behind planned levels.  For example, Congress authorized $35 million for the network in 2005, but appropriated only $8 million.

Experts contend that spending on mitigation reaps huge dividends.  They point out that retrofitted roads and buildings survived the Northridge earthquake, while others that hadn't been retrofitted did not.

Some experts fear Americans have become complacent about earthquake risks because it's been more than 10 years since the Northridge quake.

"What happens is people forget and people lose interest in the seismic networks," said Jeroen Tromp, director of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.  "And then how do you stay alive?  How do you generate enough funding to do more than just keep your head above water?"

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